A Gospel for the Poor

The past few years have witnessed a resurgence in studies on the religious Left in the United States and Latin America. The mass hysteria of scholars running to document the meteoric rise of Pentecostalism seems to have given way to a more concerted effort to document the politics of faith, not simply its numeric growth. David C. Kirkpatrick's A Gospel for the Poor is part of this trend. His book takes us to Latin America and the evangelical Protestants who fashioned a progressive Christianity in the shadows of Catholic social teachings. This important book correctly identifies the Cold War as “the seedbed of social Christianity” and, in a Latin American context, where the theological and political influence coming from the North clashed with the cultural and political revolutions in the South (p. 2). The book covers a lot of ground. In seven well-written chapters, the author takes a biographical and chronological approach to the development of social Christianity among Protestants in Latin America. Latin American Christians such as Samuel Escobar and René Padilla take center stage as Kirkpatrick tells the story through their eyes

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